• Computers and Concrete
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.93-100
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• 2018

It is seldom possible that geotechnical materials like rocks and concretes found without joints, cracks, or discontinuities. Thereby, the impact of micro-cracks on the mechanical properties of them is to be considered. In the present study, the effect of micro-crack on the failure mechanism of rock specimens under uniaxial compression was investigated experimentally. For this purpose, thermal stress was used to induce micro-cracks in the specimens. Several cylindrical and disk shape specimens were drilled from granite collected from Zanjan granite mine, Iran. Some of the prepared specimens were kept in room temperature and the others were heated by a laboratory furnace to different temperature levels (200, 400, 600, 800 and 1000 degree Celsius). During the experimental tests, Acoustic Emission (AE) sensors were used to monitor specimen failure at the different loading sequences. Also, Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) was used to distinguish the induced micro-crack by heating in the specimens. The fractographic analysis revealed that the thin sections heated to $800^{\circ}C$ and $1000^{\circ}C$ contain some induced micro-fractures, but in the thin sections heated to $200^{\circ}C$, $400^{\circ}C$ and $600^{\circ}C$ have not been observed any micro-fracture. In the next, a comprehensive experimental investigation was made to evaluate mechanical properties of heated and unheated specimens. Results of experimental tests showed that induced micro-cracks significantly influence on the failure mode of specimens. The specimens kept at room temperature failed in the splitting mode, while the failure mode of specimens heated to $800^{\circ}C$ are shearing and the specimens heated to $1000^{\circ}C$ failed in the spalling mode. On the basis of AE monitoring, it is found that with increasing of the micro-crack density, the ratio of the number of shear cracks to the number of tensile cracks increases, under loading sequences.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.29 no.12
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• pp.95-104
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• 2013

Recently, application of CSG is increasing in various design construction projects. At the initial stage of cementation CSG materials show the same mechanical characteristics as soil, however, as the cementation process develops, CSG materials gradually reveal material characteristics of concrete. The hardened CSG manifests elastic behavior such as maximum strength at small strain range and rapid brittle failure. In this research, PVA fiber stiffeners were used in order to: (1) reduce such brittle behavioral characteristics; (2) improve the relatively weak tension performance of CSG materials. The binding strength between the bed materials and fiber prevents rapid brittle failure and increases tensional strength of fiber reinforced CSG materials.Test results show that fiber reinforcement alone could induce the stress-strain characteristics of CSG materials from brittle failure to ductile failure and also increase the residual strength.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.107-115
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• 2022

With the improvements in computer technologies, utilization of image processing techniques has increased in many areas (such as medicine, defence industry, other industries etc.) Many different image processing techniques are used for surface analysis, detection of manufacturing defects, and determination of physical and mechanical characteristics of composite materials. In this study, cementitious composites were obtained by addition of Grounded Granulated Blast-Furnace Slag (GGBFS), Styrene Butadiene polymer (SBR), and Grounded Granulated Blast-Furnace Slag and Styrene Butadiene polymer together (GGBFS+SBR). Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) beads were added to these cementitious composites in different ratios (20%, 40% and 60%). The mechanical and physical characteristics of the composites were determined, and homogeneity indexes of the composites were determined by image processing techniques to determine EPS distribution forms in them. Physical and mechanical characteristics of the produced samples were obtained by applying consistency, density, water absorption, compressive strength (7 and 28 days), flexural strength (7 and 28 days) and tensile splitting strength (7 and 28 days) tests on them. Also, visual examination by using digital microscope, and image analysis by using image processing techniques with open source coded ImageJ program were performed. As a result of the study, it is determined that GGBFS and SBR addition strengthens the adhesion sites formed as it increases the adhesion power of the mixture and helps to get rid of the segregation problem caused by EPS. As a result of the image processing analysis it is demonstrated that GGBFS and SBR addition has positive contribution on homogeneity index.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.131-141
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• 2010

The objective of this study was to propose a development length equation for GFRP bars. A total of 104 modified pullout tests were completed while the test variables were embedment length (15, 30, $45d_b$), net cover thickness ($0.5{\sim}2.0d_b$), top-cast bar effect, different GFRP bar types (K2KR, K3KR and AsUS), and bar diameters (10, 13, 16 mm). Average bond stresses were determined based on modified pullout test results. Two variable linear regression analysis was performed of the average bond stresses. Utilizing 5% fractile concept, a conservative development length design equation was derived. The design equation derived in this study was compared to the ACI 440 committee equation. The cross-comparison revealed that the current equation resulted in shorter development lengths than those determined by the ACI 440 equation when the net cover thickness was large (greater than $1.0d_b$). On the other hand, when the net cover thickness was small (equal to or less than $1.0d_b$), the development lengths required by the current equation were larger than those by the ACI equation. The bond stresses were significantly influenced by the cover thicknesses. The current equation results in development lengths that are more economical when the cover thickness is large, and more conservative lengths when the cover thickness is small than the ACI 440 committee equation.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.1243-1244
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• 2022

In recent years, the growing interest in off-site construction has led to factories scaling up their manufacturing and production processes in the construction sector. Consequently, continuous large-scale site monitoring in low-variability environments, such as prefabricated components production plants (precast concrete production), has gained increasing importance. Although many studies on computer vision-based site monitoring have been conducted, challenges for deploying this technology for large-scale field applications still remain. One of the issues is collecting and transmitting vast amounts of video data. Continuous site monitoring systems are based on real-time video data collection and analysis, which requires excessive computational resources and network traffic. In addition, it is difficult to integrate various object information with different sizes and scales into a single scene. Various sizes and types of objects (e.g., workers, heavy equipment, and materials) exist in a plant production environment, and these objects should be detected simultaneously for effective site monitoring. However, with the existing object detection algorithms, it is difficult to simultaneously detect objects with significant differences in size because collecting and training massive amounts of object image data with various scales is necessary. This study thus developed a large-scale site monitoring system using edge computing and a small-object detection system to solve these problems. Edge computing is a distributed information technology architecture wherein the image or video data is processed near the originating source, not on a centralized server or cloud. By inferring information from the AI computing module equipped with CCTVs and communicating only the processed information with the server, it is possible to reduce excessive network traffic. Small-object detection is an innovative method to detect different-sized objects by cropping the raw image and setting the appropriate number of rows and columns for image splitting based on the target object size. This enables the detection of small objects from cropped and magnified images. The detected small objects can then be expressed in the original image. In the inference process, this study used the YOLO-v5 algorithm, known for its fast processing speed and widely used for real-time object detection. This method could effectively detect large and even small objects that were difficult to detect with the existing object detection algorithms. When the large-scale site monitoring system was tested, it performed well in detecting small objects, such as workers in a large-scale view of construction sites, which were inaccurately detected by the existing algorithms. Our next goal is to incorporate various safety monitoring and risk analysis algorithms into this system, such as collision risk estimation, based on the time-to-collision concept, enabling the optimization of safety routes by accumulating workers' paths and inferring the risky areas based on workers' trajectory patterns. Through such developments, this continuous large-scale site monitoring system can guide a construction plant's safety management system more effectively.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.18 no.1 s.91
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• pp.21-28
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• 2006

This paper presents both experimental and analytical studies for the development of an ECC(Engineered Cementitious Composites) using ground granulated blast furnace slag(slag). This material has been focused on achieving moderately high composite strength while maintaining high ductility, represented by strain-hardening behavior in uniaxial tension. In the material development, micromechanics was adopted to properly select optimized range of the composition based on steady-state cracking theory and experimental studies on matrix, and interfacial properties. A single fiber pullout test and a wedge splitting test were employed to measure the bond properties of the fiber in a matrix and the fracture toughness of mortar matrix. The addition of the slag resulted in slight increases in the frictional bond strength and the fracture toughness. Subsequent direct tensile tests demonstrate that the fiber reinforced mortar exhibited high ductile uniaxial tension behavior with a maximum strain capacity of 3.6%. Both ductility and tensile strength(~5.3 MPa) of the composite produced with slag were measured to be significantly higher than those of the composite without slag. The slag particles contribute to improving matrix strength and fiber dispersion, which is incorporated with enhanced workability attributed to the oxidized grain surface. This result suggests that, within the limited slag dosage employed in the present study, the contribution of slag particles to the workability overwhelms the side-effect of decreased potential of saturated multiple cracking.